Archive for the 'digital studies' Category

While in Köln DH people gather for the DHd 2018 conference, under the nice title “Kritik der digitalen Vernunft”, I have been reading a nice contribution from Prof. Pierre Chiron from the Université Paris-Est Créteil, who I happened to meet one year ago, while being in Paris, actually at the very moment when he published the article. So, it is a pity that I had to wait one year before discovering this piece of writing!

It is an interesting essay on the advantages and the challenges of the digital technologies to which we are now used, often without fully understand the ways they may influence our behaviours in the long term. His focus lies on the educational environment and, perhaps a little surprisingly, he finds a way back to one of the ancient systems of rhetorical education (the progymnasmata) to describe his vision of new learning practices, where digital tools may play a crucial role.

Last week, at the last session of a series of conference about new approaches to Classics (Alte Texte – neue Ergebnisse), Prof. Markus Friedrich from the University of Hamburg talked about the reception of new technological inventions in the Humanities (Exzerpt, Photoauftrag, Datenbank: zur Entwicklung und Bedeutung technischer Hilfsmittel in der Geschichtswissenschaft). He focused in particular on the ways scholars had access to the primary sources and how they started to use devices enabling them to transport the information these documents contained to their working places where they could explore them further.

First he discussed the advent of photography which allowed scholars to move beyond copying manually the texts and get more accurate documents to work on once they left the library or the archive where the primary sources were. As a second step he mentioned the usage of photocopies and other ways of reproducing faithfully a great number of sources and documents. Finally in a third step he dealt with the digital tools that are available now.

However, it is not so much this tripartition which is striking, but his observation that it is actually this third step that raised the most vigorous criticism from scholars. He was himself rather surprised by his findings and wondered whether there may be witnesses of such a suspiciousness against the technologies used previously. However, if his observation is correct, it may also raise the question of that would be so peculiar about the currently available digital tools and technologies to be more subjects to criticism than previously used tools.

As a quick note, I just copy here the call for paper for the conference, that will be held at the University of Grenoble between the 2nd and the 4th of September 2015:

Call for paper “Digital Humanities: the example of Antiquity”

The University ‘Stendhal’ of Grenoble 3, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme-Alpes, L’Université Grenoble 2, the Humboldt Chair for Digital Humanities and HISOMA organise the conference “Digital Humanities: the example of Antiquity”. The conference will take place in Grenoble, from the 2nd to the 4th of September 2015.
The goal of this conference is twofold: at the same time an assessment of existing methodologies and a looking forward to new ones. It also has the objective of evaluating current practices of the application of Digital Humanities to the study of antiquity, practices which are quite numerous but also sometimes disconnected from each other and without an overall understanding. The conference also aims to contribute toward the design of new projects and the opening new paths, by establishing a dialogue between scholars for whom the Digital Humanities are already familiar and those wishing to acquire knowledge and practice in this domain.
The confirmed Keynote speakers are Gregory Crane (Tufts University & University of Leipzig) and Charlotte Roueché (King’s College London). The conference will be preceded by a workshop, particularly aimed at doctoral students, but open to everybody.

The study of Antiquity encompass very large geographical, historical and linguistic domains: from the Mediterranean to the borders of Europe and Asia, from the end of Prehistory to the Middle Ages, and from Greek and Latin to the languages of the Near and Middle East. This study is also distributed among different disciplines: Linguistics, Philology, Literary Criticism, Philosophy, History, Archaeology, Epigraphy, Numismatics, etc. In all these disciplinary traditions, the application of computational techniques has been employed for several decades now, an application that has left quite a strong mark on the study of Antiquity. The employment of digital methods has also enabled substantial changes of methodology, the extent of which remains to be assessed.

Considering the diversity of such approaches in a context of research which is more and more internationalised, it seems worthwhile to present to scholars and PhD students an overview of current research in order to develop future endeavours.

The conference will be organised around four key topics: Editions of literary texts; Study of scholia and commentaries; Archaeology and Epigraphy; Prosopography and historical geography. Papers will focus on methodological questions and/or discuss general issues emerging within such topics. We also encourage proposals of posters presenting work in progress.

Please send your proposals of up to 300 words, in French or English (which will be the languages of the conference) by the 15th of January 2015 to the organisers:
icogitore@msh-alpes.fr
elena.pierazzo@u-grenoble3.fr
NB: In order to encourage the participation of young researchers, we will provide a limited number of bursaries. If you wish to be considered for one of these then please include a letter of motivation with your application.

On February 16-18, 2015 there will be a planning seminar for the new Sunoikisis Programme in Europe. The courses will be organised and hosted by the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities in Leipzig. It is inspired by the Sunoikisis programme offered since 1999 at the Center for Hellenic studies:

It will offer courses in digital humanities for students of Greek and Latin and takes advantage of the experience the organisers acquired while creating the Perseids platform. The venue in February will therefore also inform about this platform and give some practical insights into the new tool. Have a look at their announcement and consider joining them!

I will be presenting some aspects of my work on Demetrios of Scepsis at the 14th FIEC Conference which will be held in Bordeaux in a couple of days (25th-30th August). The presentation belongs to panel 1 which as been entitled Ecdotica: current trends in the edition and criticism of the classics (with two many subjects: epistemology of classical scholarship and editing fragmentary texts). Here is the programme of the panel:

Here is the announcement for the second venue on fragments happening this summer. Fragments, seen as reused textual elements, will be the theme of a panel discussion at the Digital Humanity 2014 Conference which will be held in Lausanne from the 7th to the 12th July. More information about the panel may be found at wiki.digitalclassicist.org, but here a sort summary of the approach the panel will explore:

Text reuse – the meaningful reiteration of text, usually beyond the simple repetition of common language – is a broad concept that can naturally be understood at different levels and studied in a large variety of contexts. This panel will gather researchers from different projects focussing on text reuse in the field of Digital Classics with the aim of discussing the possible approaches to and understandings of the notion. It will also bring together current efforts and lay the ground for further research.

I am really looking forward, especially after having attended the Warsaw conference on fragments last week, to taking part in this panel. It will be particularly interesting for me to switch from one domain, Classics, and its approach to fragments to the other, Digital Humanities. Both research fields face the same difficulties when dealing with the fragmentariness of the past, but each has its own tradition and methodology. The challenge consists, therefore, in bringing both fields together.

In each of them the quotations and textual reuses have been marked and defined. This was one of the main aims of the project and the result is a convincing demonstration of what is possible. It is a real pleasure to browse through them and they can be viewed in several parallel windows so that comparing them becomes much easier. Also very extant indices exist and for some translations in several modern languages provide helpful tools for the reading and analysing of these texts. It is therefore a huge step forward for the study of this set of texts. Moreover, as the digital tools, documentation and methodology is freely available the results of the research can be used for other projects and texts.

Also with regard to the content, wisdom literature and the transmission of sayings and proverbs, is a fascinating topic and the project has brought it to the fore!

I have just received, as everybody subscribed to the Liverpool Classicists mailing-list, the message that the British Library digitised the manuscript of Homer’s Iliad named after its owner Charles Townley and containing the so-called T-scholia.

I just had a quick look at the beginning of book 12, where the Trojan rivers are mentioned. This passage is to be found on folio 123r. I chose this part as we, Simona Stoyanova and myself, were working in the last couples of month on Demetrios’s fragments 29 to 31. These three fragments are in Gaede’s edition actually three clusters of several texts. First there is Strabo 13.1.43-45 [C 602-603] which is a close description of the river system of the Troad. Gaede adds to this first witness several of the scholia to Il. 12.20, most of them coming precisely from the manuscript which has been digitised. Further we find some elements from Hesychius and Eustathius.

Interesting to find fr. 64, a comment on the Simois, as an interlinear scholia here. Gaede’s arrangement puts this fragment in a completely different context. It is linked to the fragments mentioning the homonymy between places in Crete and in the Troad rather than to those describing the river system. It is therefore very helpful that the digitised folio reminds us of the context of its transmission.

Then the layout is also interesting. The comments on the rivers are separated in two blocks designated with two different signs. In the first the Rhesos is the lemma and the comment is about this river only whereas the second contains the remarks about the Caresos, the Rhodios, the Grancios and the Scamander. This has not been taken into account in Gaede’s presentation and we may start thinking about whether this may have some meaning or not. But, anyway, it is a huge progress that we can look at it now in such an easy way!